All The World’s A Stage: Scott Caan’s “The Trouble We Come From”

Gender relations and identity have been recurring themes in much of Scott Caan’s work, and they’ve never been more evident than in his most recent play, “The Trouble We Come From.” The play’s structure is a departure from Caan’s typical approach, but without missing a beat, he deftly weaves flashbacks, scenes within scenes and a play within a play to not only take the audience on a journey through his main character’s psyche but through our own as well.

When we first meet Charlie (played with an endearing befuddlement and sweet earnestness by Michael Weston), he is frantic, fearfully peering through the windows of (what we assume) is his own house. He enters it cautiously and proceeds to have multiple heart attacks as he stumbles upon burning candles, incense, a glass of wine, a vandalized photo of him and his girlfriend, and finally a pair of red lace panties strewn across the back of his couch. Within seconds it’s apparent he’s having one of the worst nights of his life.

Completely in a tizzy, Charlie scrambles up the stairs to his bedroom, and after finally ascertaining that his unwelcome intruder Samantha is no longer in the house, he calls his best friend, Vince (Scott Caan).

Caan is superb as Charlie/Weston’s foil. Released from playing the angst of existential crisis, Caan plays Vince with impish abandon. The result is a performance that is pure joy.

As Charlie begins to explain to Vince what has sent him over the edge, we discover that after finding out his girlfriend Shelly is pregnant, and having a poor enough reaction to send her running off to Detroit, he has had several unexpected encounters with girlfriends from his past that have left him questioning his future.

These past girlfriends (plus one additional character) are all played by the same actress, Teri Reeves. In a remarkable Tatiana Maslany-esque feat, Reeves seamlessly creates four completely separate and believable personas: Joanna, Samantha, Kelly, and “the Blonde.”

I want to divert a moment to talk about Shelly (Claire Van Der Boom), who even in her absence throughout much of the play is remarkably present. Not only do we see her through Charlie’s eyes, but we see her through Vince’s as well, not to mention her influence on the physicality of her and Charlie’s living space. Thanks to Shelly, the refrigerator is chock full of unexpired goodness and, in what will become a running gag throughout the play, is also equipped with a foghorn like alarm that goes off when the door is left open for too long.

Far from being written as a controlling leash-wielding fun-stealing bitch who is a threat to Charlie and Vince’s friendship, Shelly is spoken of only in fondness by both Charlie and Vince.  The rigged refrigerator leads to Vince questioning what is going on with Charlie that would require it (when Charlie was seven he left the refrigerator door open and ruined everything inside. His mother “lost her mind, slapped him around and took off for a couple days.”) Not once does Vince offer a condemnation of Shelly for installing it. Word that Shelly is pregnant doesn’t spell the depressing end of the world for life as Charlie and Vince have known it. Instead, Vince is thrilled. “We’re having a baby,” Vince crows with glee, and thus inserts himself happily into Charlie and Shelly’s growing home.

As Vince begins trying to talk Charlie down off the ledge, we begin to discover what has put him there. It is here that we are treated to our first “flashback,” or scene within a scene. Vince doesn’t simply fade into the background though. Far from it, he is as active an observer as we are, and Caan’s facial expressions as he watches these exchanges are priceless. 

First up is Latina Femme Fatale Joanna. The Temptress, the snake in the garden, the overpowering Id, and pure fantasy. Charlie says she’s “without question the greatest sex I’ve ever had.” In fact, Joanna is a powerful, and very recognizable, cultural trope. In the face of her, what man could be expected to resist? Who could blame him? It’s her fault, not his, for seducing him. This is our expectation anyway. And if it’s not clear enough where we’ve seen “Joanna’s” before in past dramatic representations, Caan makes sure we get it by calling up images of “Fatal Attraction” through a reference to bunnies boiling in pots.

Reeves is an absolute delight as she teases and torments an increasingly flustered Charlie, who is barely able to stand his ground against her. She completely disregards his attempts to say no, even going so far as to physically accost him, pursing his lips with her own fingers to force him tell her what she is demanding to hear. In fact Joanna is the main reason Charlie has begged Vince to come to his house, as protection against Joanna’s sexual wiles and aggression.

Next we meet Samantha, one of Charlie’s two past loves. She’s the girl Charlie couldn’t get out of his system. Done was never done, and breakup after breakup only led to Charlie chasing after her again until she finally got back together with him. Then one day he stopped chasing her and she was left alone. For that reason, Charlie is convinced he ruined Samantha’s life and her appearance now is tied to her need for revenge.

Reeve’s Samantha is petulant and demanding. In a classic ex-girlfriend goes psychotic Lifetime movie move, she makes herself at home in Shelly and Charlie’s house, taking a lighter to Shelly’s face in the picture on the table and draping her panties on the back of the couch. Like with Joanna, we see the dark side of women’s sexual “empowerment,” one that strikes fear in the men involved.

In the middle of Charlie’s struggle to convince Samantha to leave his house, he runs into “the Blonde” outside the theater. Reeves’ imbues the character with a coy innocence and as the music swells, we see an instant connection between the two. She invites Charlie for a drink. Once again Charlie is faced with temptation, and it’s all he can do to say no, going so far as falling down on his knees in agony as she walks away.

Samantha only agrees to leave Shelly and Charlie’s house when Charlie promises to meet her later at her own. The first act breaks with, much to Vince’s chagrin, Charlie leaving to fulfill said promise and Vince waiting for Joanna.  

If there is a running theme throughout Act One, it seems to be a deep anxiety about male helplessness in the face of a female seductress. And Caan wastes no time in knocking it down. Vince’s thoughts on accountability are made quite clear early in the act when he scolds Charlie for trying to excuse his actions by saying he knows they’re stupid.

Vince says: “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this, you do it a lot. Saying something is stupid, admitting to it before you say it, does not in any way exonerate the stupid thing you’re about to say. It’s still stupid. It doesn’t make it any less so if you cop to it before hand.”

In other words, admitting you’re a stupid asshole doesn’t excuse you from accountability for being a stupid asshole. Biological urges do not excuse bad behavior. No matter what Joanna, Samantha, or even the Blonde do, the only person to blame for Charlie’s actions is Charlie. 

It’s a refreshing slap in the face at a seemingly cultural imperative to lay the blame for men’s actions at the feet of women. Her dress was too short, her shirt too low what’s a man to do it’s out of his control. Vince, and Caan, call bullshit.

Act Two begins with what may go down as one of my favorite sequences in the play. It’s still nighttime; Charlie returns home and grabs a bowl of cereal, leaving the refrigerator door open. The foghorn blows and Caan goes to town with physical comedy as Vince, sleeping under a blanket on the couch, yells in terror, promptly falls off and then scrambles in a blind panic across the floor, only stopping when he hits the stairs leading to the bedroom. Chest heaving, he hangs on to both the blanket and a pillow for dear life as he tries to pull himself together.

Already miffed at his rude awakening, Vince grows increasingly agitated as Charlie’s explanation of what happened with Samantha meanders around through various musings on the progression of women’s sexuality. But finally Charlie admits that nothing happened with Samantha. He ended it. For good. 

Breathing a sigh of relief, Vince is ready to claim victory for Shelly and Charlie and call it a night. Until Charlie reminds him it’s not over. They still have to deal with Kelly. Samantha wasn’t the only woman besides Shelly he ever loved.

But before Charlie talks about Kelly, he wants to know what happened with Joanna. As Vince desperately tries to change the subject, Charlie susses out that Joanna and Vince slept together. In yet another hilarious sequence, Charlie demands to know how it was, and Vince finally admits it was… okay. Charlie has a harder time accepting that Vince didn’t have the best sex of his life with Joanna than that his ex girlfriend and best friend had sex all over his house. As Vince comments later in the play, fantasy always trumps reality.

But finally Charlie tells his final story of the night and we flash back to his conversation with Kelly.

Reeves brings a sweet vulnerability to Kelly. Unlike Joanna or Samantha, Kelly bares her soul for Charlie, and us. She admits she was a shell of a person when she was with Charlie, too afraid of rejection to be true to herself. But everything in her life is wonderful now, and she’s ready to be in a relationship. She wants Charlie back. Needs him back. Because despite how great her life is, it is, in essence, empty without him in it. His final rejection breaks her heart. Unable to even look at him, she walks away in tears.

Kelly is also a woman all of us know. Whether we identify with her ourselves or just recognize her lovelorn desperation from romance novels and movies. Culturally speaking, Kelly is the girl who reminds all us other girls that our lives are not complete without a man.

But there is more to this story, and it’s Vince who tells it. Charlie treated Kelly like crap. And she let him. What did Charlie do on Kelly’s birthday? Played golf with Vince. Bros before ho’s? Not in Vince’s world. The way Charlie and Kelly interacted was wrong. Nowhere does Caan make it clearer that relationships and sex needs to be a two way street than in Kelly’s story. Vince’s biggest condemnation of Kelly and Charlie’s relationship is that Kelly never had a voice, not in bed and not anywhere else. That’s not a relationship, Vince says, that’s prostitution. Female desire is every bit as important as male desire.

Throughout the play, Charlie has noted the cosmic coincidence of running into these four women on this particular night at this particular time. He’s convinced that somehow he’s being tested. It’s teased early on that the entire thing might be a setup when both Joanna and Samantha clearly know who Shelly is and follow her on social media.  Jealousy and competition between women over men and women’s distrust of their male partner’s fidelity resonate culturally—and the motivations for all these women to play this game are certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

But Caan knocks that down too. Vince doesn’t even consider for a moment that Shelly is “twisted” enough to pull off such a thing. In fact, it’s none of these women’s fault this is happening. It’s Charlie, Vince surmises, who has in fact put all three women back into play in his life in order to test himself. And as far as The Blonde goes, desire for other women doesn’t end with commitment. That’s just the way the universe works. The point is, Vince reminds him, that Charlie said no, took responsibility for his own actions, and passed. With flying colors. 

Night turns to day and Vince tells Charlie it’s time for him to let himself off the hook and enjoy the beautiful life he is creating with Shelly and their baby. As Charlie pulls a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and promptly closes the door, it’s a physical verification of the progress Charlie has made in his life.

Now we finally get to meet Shelly in the flesh, but all our expectations for what comes next are sent spinning when she walks onto stage from the audience holding the playbill for “The Trouble We Come From” in her hand even as we hear Charlie thank the crew for their hard work and tell them he’ll see them the next day.

In that moment it’s revealed that none of what we just witnessed was “real;” it was all artifice, a play within a play.

Claire Van Der Boom brings a range of emotions to Shelly. Both self assured and vulnerable, Shelly is not afraid to speak her mind. She is appalled at the play she just witnessed, appalled that Charlie not only feels the need to put his angst up for public display but that he still has that angst at all. Shelly might want Charlie in her life, but she doesn’t need him, especially at the expense of her own dignity.

As she walks away, Charlie scrambles to explain himself. The play wasn’t real. Yes, he has anxiety, yes he comes from a shitty childhood and has a hard time accepting the good things that have happened in his life, but he’s emotionally mature enough and intellectually developed enough to know that what he has with Shelly is good. He loves her, appreciates her, and wants to build a life with her. Their relationship is healthy and therefore as Shelly puts it, boring. No one would want (or perhaps need) to watch it, but “living it,” Charlie says, “is fucking fantastic.”

And then Charlie falls down on one knee and in yet another defiance of expectation, the play doesn’t end with an engagement. While Charlie offers to marry her if that’s what Shelly wants, Shelly tells him none of that matters. When she says “I do,” she’s saying yes to the only thing that does matter: building a life together, with him and, she reveals, their daughter.  

Early in the play, Vince says it’s a concept of God that offers hope for dealing with our problems. But one of the things that I love most about Caan’s work is optimism that things can be better. We can be better. Identities and ideas that hold us back can be teased out and overcome. Sometimes, though, the hardest thing to do is recognize when we are being culturally played. This is the trouble we all come from.

But this is why art needs to recognize and focus on what’s broken in our culture. What makes Caan such an important voice at this particular moment in time, is that he uses what’s broken to show how it could be made right.